Social psychology

KENNETH CHARLES D.
BERMEJO, RPm, LPT
Behavior and attitudes
Behavior and attitudes
• In social psychology, attitudes are defined as beliefs
and feelings related to a person or an event (Eagly &
Chaiken, 2005). Thus, a person may have a negative
attitude toward coffee, a neutral attitude toward the
French, and a positive attitude toward the next-door
neighbor.
attitude
feelings, often
influenced by our
beliefs, that
predispose us to
respond favorably or
unfavorably to
objects, people, and
events.
HOW WELL DO OUR
ATTITUDES PREDICT OUR
BEHAVIOR?
How well do our attiudes predict
our behavior?
• A blow to the supposed power of attitudes came when social
psychologist Allan Wicker (1969) reviewed several dozen
research studies covering a variety of people, attitudes, and
behaviors. Wicker offered a shocking conclusion: People’s
expressed attitudes hardly predicted their varying behaviors.
• Student attitudes toward cheating bore little relation to the likelihood
of their actually cheating.
• Attitudes toward organized religion were only modestly linked with
weekly worship attendance.
• Self-described racial attitudes provided little clue to behaviors in
actual situations. Many people say they are upset when someone
makes racist remarks; yet when they hear racist language, many
respond with indifference (Kawakami et al., 2009).
How well do our attiudes predict
our behavior?
• The disjuncture between attitudes and actions is what
Daniel Batson and his colleagues (1997, 2001, 2002;
Valdesolo & DeSteno, 2007, 2008) call “moral
hypocrisy” (appearing moral while avoiding the costs of
being so).
Their studies presented people with an
appealing task with a possible $30
prize and a dull task with no rewards.
The participants had to do one of the
tasks and assign a supposed second
participant to the other.
 Their studies presented people with an
appealing task with a possible $30
prize and a dull task with no rewards.
The participants had to do one of the
tasks and assign a supposed second
participant to the other.

tas
k task
 Randomly
choose
participants
to receive a tas
task. k

task
Only 1 in 20 believed that assigning
the appealing task with the reward to
themselves was the more moral thing
to do, yet 80% did so. Even when told
to randomly assign tasks with a coin
flip, more than 85% still gave
themselves the better-paying
assignment — meaning a good
number were fibbing about the coin
flip’s outcome. When morality and
greed were put on a collision course,
greed usually won.
When Attitudes Predict Behavior
Our attitudes do predict our behavior when influences on
what we say and do are minimal, when the attitude is
specific to the behavior, and when the attitude is potent.
WHEN SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON
WHAT WE SAY ARE MINIMAL
• Today’s social psychologists have some clever means at
their disposal for minimizing social influences on
people’s attitude reports. Some of these are measures
of implicit (unconscious) attitudes — our often
unacknowledged inner beliefs that may or may not
correspond to our explicit (conscious) attitudes.
• The most widely used measure of implicit attitudes is
the implicit association test (IAT), which uses reaction
times to measure how quickly people associate
concepts (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013).
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Researcher can measure implicit

racial attitudes by assessing whether
white people take longer to associate
positive words with Black faces than
with white faces.
 WHEN SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON
WHAT WE SAY ARE MINIMAL
• implicit biases are pervasive. For example,
implicit
(unconscious)
80% of people show more implicit dislike for
the elderly compared with the young.
our attitudes often
unacknowledged • people differ in implicit bias. Depending on
inner beliefs that their group memberships, their conscious
may or may not attitudes, and the bias in their immediate
correspond to our environment, some people exhibit more
explicit implicit bias than others.
(conscious)
attitudes. • people are often unaware of their implicit
biases. Despite believing they are not
prejudiced, even researchers themselves show
implicit biases against some social groups.
 WHEN SOCIAL INFLUENCES ON
WHAT WE SAY ARE MINIMAL
• Do implicit biases predict behavior? A review of
implicit
the available research (now several hundred
Aassociation test
computer-driven investigations) reveals that behavior is
(IAT)
assessment of
implicit attitudes. predicted best with a combination of both
The test uses implicit and explicit (self-report) measures
reaction times to (Greenwald et al., 2015; Nosek et al., 2011).
measure people’s
automatic
associations
between attitude
objects and
evaluative words.
Easier pairings (and
faster responses)
are taken to
indicate stronger
unconscious
associations.
WHEN OTHER INFLUENCES ON
BEHAVIOR ARE MINIMAL
• personal attitudes are not the only determinant of behavior; the situation
matters, too. As we will see again and again, situational influences can be
enormous — enormous enough to induce people to violate their deepest
convictions.
• For example: people’s general attitude toward religion doesn’t do a very
good job at predicting whether they will go to religious services during the
coming week, probably because attendance is also influenced by the
weather, the religious leader, how one is feeling, and so forth.
• But religious attitudes predict the total quantity of religious behaviors over
time across many situations (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1974; Kahle & Berman,
1979).
• The findings define a principle of aggregation: the effects of an attitude
become more apparent when we look at a person’s aggregate or average
behavior.
 CAN WE PREDICT
HIS ATTENDANCE
TO CHURCH BY
KNOWING HIS A
DEVOTED
CATHOLIC?

DEVOTED
CATHOLIC
 ANSWER IS, WE CAN’T, WE
NEED TO KNOW HIS OTHER
ATTITUDE TOWARDS
RELIGION. BASICALLY
CHECKING HIS AVERAGE
behavior TOWARDS
RELIGION, we can then
make a prediction.

DEVOTED
CATHOLIC
WHEN ATTITUDES ARE SPECIFIC TO
THE BEHAVIOR
• Further studies — more than 700 studies with 276,000
participants — confirmed that specific, relevant
attitudes do predict intended and actual behavior
(Armitage & Conner, 2001; Six & Eckes, 1996; Wallace
et al., 2005). For
• example, attitudes toward condoms strongly predict
condom use (Albarracin et al., 2001). And attitudes
toward recycling (but not general attitudes toward
environmental issues) predict intention to recycle,
which predicts actual recycling (Nigbur et al., 2010;
Oskamp, 1991).
• A practical lesson: To change habits through
If someone use condom
every time he had sex,
Can we predict that
someone will advocate
family planning and safe
sex?
Unlikely, though we can
assume that he will
advocate on condom
using during sex.
Theory of planned behavior
WHEN ATTITUDES ARE POTENT
• Much of our behavior is automatic. We act out familiar scripts
without reflecting on what we’re doing. We respond to people we
meet in the hall with an automatic “Hi.” We answer the restaurant
cashier’s question “How was your meal?” by saying, “Fine,” even if
we found it only so-so.

• Such mindlessness is adaptive. It frees our minds to work on other

things. For habitual behaviors — seat belt use, coffee
consumption, class attendance — conscious intentions are hardly
activated (Wood, 2017). As the philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead (1911, p. 61) argued, “Civilization advances by
extending the number of operations that we can perform without
thinking about them.”
WHEN ATTITUDES ARE POTENT:
BRINGING ATTITUDES TO MIND
• Much of our behavior is automatic. We act out familiar scripts
without reflecting on what we’re doing. We respond to people we
meet in the hall with an automatic “Hi.” We answer the restaurant
cashier’s question “How was your meal?” by saying, “Fine,” even if
we found it only so-so.

• Such mindlessness is adaptive. It frees our minds to work on other

things. For habitual behaviors — seat belt use, coffee
consumption, class attendance — conscious intentions are hardly
activated (Wood, 2017). As the philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead (1911, p. 61) argued, “Civilization advances by
extending the number of operations that we can perform without
thinking about them.”
Make them self-aware, perhaps by
having them act in front of a mirror
(Carver & Scheier, 1981). Maybe you,
too, can recall suddenly being acutely
aware of yourself upon entering a
room with a large mirror. Making
people self-aware in this way
promotes consistency between words
and deeds (Froming et al., 1982;
Gibbons, 1978).
Who will
cheat?
Only 7 percent
cheated
71 percent
cheated
WHEN ATTITUDES ARE POTENT:
FORGING STRONG ATTITUDES THROUGH EXPERIENCE

• when attitudes are forged by experience, not just by

hearsay, they are more accessible, more enduring, and
more likely to guide actions.
When I was growing up,
my mother always tells
me that martial law was
a good thing bcoz no
child gets raped, and
basically less crime.
I always told her, be that
as it is, but you won’t
praise martial law if one
day your child went
outside and didn’t come
back home.
Those people who lost a
loved one during martial
law are more likely to
advocate against it, than
those people who didn’t
lost a loved one.
when attitudes are
forged by experience,
not just by hearsay, they
are more accessible,
more enduring, and more
likely to guide actions.
WHEN DOES OUR
BEHAVIOR AFFECT OUR
ATTITUDES?
Role Playing
Role playing
• Think of a time when you stepped into some new role
— perhaps your first days on a job or at college. That
first week on campus, for example, you may have been
hypersensitive to your new social situation and tried
valiantly to act mature and to suppress your high
school behavior. At such times, you may have felt self-
conscious. You observed your new speech and actions
because they weren’t natural to you. Then something
amazing happened: Your pseudo-intellectual talk no
longer felt forced. The role began to fit as comfortably
as your old jeans and T-shirt.
 role

A set of norms
that defines
how people in
I’m not a high school a given social
student anymore. I’m position ought
to behave.
in college now, I
have to act mature.

High college
school
Role playing
• In one national study of U.S. Adolescents, playing “risk-
glorifying” video games was followed by increased risky
and deviant real-life behaviors (hull et al., 2014).

• The moral: When we act out a role, we slightly change

our former selves into being more like the role.
Ano nga ba ang
role ng
panganay?
What does Zimbardo
wanted to prove on
his experiment?
He wanted to point
out that, the
environment will
corrupt you.
The things is, that neglects
the personal factor, there
are two factors that affects
our decision or judgement,
our self, and our
environment.
Broken windows theory
• The broken windows theory states that visible signs of
disorder and misbehavior in an environment encourage
further disorder and misbehavior, leading to serious
crimes. The principle was developed to explain the
decay of neighborhoods, but it is often applied to work
and educational environments.
Broken windows theory
• Broken windows theory, proposed by James Q. Wilson
and George Kelling in 1982 that used broken windows
as a metaphor for disorder within neighborhoods. Their
theory links disorder and incivility within a community
to subsequent occurrences of serious crime.
• Broken windows theory had an enormous impact on
police policy throughout the 1990s and remained
influential into the 21st century. Perhaps the most
notable application of the theory was in New York City
under the direction of Police Commissioner William
Bratton.
Broken windows theory
• He and others were convinced that the aggressive order-maintenance
practices of the New York City Police Department were responsible for
the dramatic decrease in crime rates within the city during the 1990s.
Bratton began translating the theory into practice as the chief of New
York City’s transit police from 1990 to 1992.
• Squads of plainclothes officers were assigned to catch turnstile jumpers,
and, as arrests for misdemeanors increased, subway crimes of all kinds
decreased dramatically. In 1994, when he became New York City police
commissioner, Bratton introduced his broken windows-based “quality of
life initiative.” This initiative cracked down on panhandling, disorderly
behaviour, public drinking, street prostitution, and unsolicited windshield
washing or other such attempts to obtain cash from drivers stopped in
traffic. When Bratton resigned in 1996, felonies were down almost 40
percent in New York, and the homicide rate had been halved.
Nakakahiya naman
magtapon ng basura
dito, ang linis ng
daan.
Luh, tapon ko na ung
basura sa bulsa ko,
dami rin naming
kalat sa daan
Broken windows theory
Scholars generally define two different types of disorder.
1. The first is physical disorder, typified by vacant buildings,
broken windows, abandoned vehicles, and vacant lots
filled with trash.
2. The second type is social disorder, which is typified by
aggressive panhandlers, noisy neighbors, and groups of
youths congregating on street corners.
The line between crime and disorder is often blurred, with some
experts considering such acts as prostitution and drug dealing as
disorder while many others classify them as crimes. While
different, these two types of disorder are both thought to increase
fear among citizens.
Saying Becomes Believing
Saying Becomes Believing
• People often adapt what they say to please their
listeners. They are quicker to tell people good news
than bad, and they adjust their message toward their
listener’s views (Manis et al., 1974; Tesser et al., 1972;
Tetlock, 1983)
Pathological liar
Evil and Moral Acts
Evil and Moral Acts
• The attitudes-follow-behavior principle also occurs for
immoral acts. Evil sometimes results from gradually
escalating commitments. A trifling evil act erodes one’s
moral sensitivity, making it easier to perform a worse
act.
Small corruption, will
eventually lead to bigger
corruption and before you
know it, accepting bribery
isn’t anything new.

fixer
Evil and Moral Acts
• The attitudes-follow-behavior phenomenon appears in
wartime. Prisoner-of-war camp guards would sometimes
display good manners to captives in their first days on
the job. Soldiers ordered to kill may initially react with
revulsion to the point of sickness over their act. But not
for long, as they became desensitized and
dehumanized their victims (Waller, 2002).
Evil and Moral Acts
• Harmful acts shape the self, but so, thankfully,
do moral acts. Our character is reflected in what
we do when we think no one is looking.
• Researchers have tested character by giving
children temptations when it seems no one is
watching. Consider what happens when children
resist the temptation.
• In a dramatic experiment, Jonathan Freedman
(1965) introduced elementary school children to
an enticing battery-controlled robot, instructing
them not to play with it while he was out of the
room. Freedman used a severe threat with half
the children and a mild threat with the others.
Both were sufficient to deter the children.
Evil and Moral Acts
• Several weeks later, a different researcher, with no
apparent relation to the earlier events, left each
child to play in the same room with the same toys.
Three-fourths of those who had heard the severe
threat now freely played with the robot; of those
given the mild threat, only a third played with it.
Apparently, the mild threat was strong enough to
elicit the desired behavior yet mild enough to leave
them with a sense of choice.
• Having earlier chosen consciously not to play with
the toy, the children who only heard the mild threat
internalized their decisions. Moral action, especially
when chosen rather than coerced, affects moral
thinking.
WHY DOES OUR
BEHAVIOR AFFECT OUR
ATTITUDES?
Self-Presentation: Impression
Management
Self-Presentation: Impression
Management
• The first explanation begins as a simple idea: We all
care about what other people think of us. People spend
billions on clothes, diets, cosmetics, and plastic surgery
— all because of their fretting over what others think.
We see making a good impression as a way to gain
social and material rewards, to feel better about
ourselves, even to become more secure in our social
identities (Leary, 1994, 2010, 2012).
 self-monitoring
Being attuned to the
way one presents
oneself in social
sensitiv insensiti situations and
e ve adjusting one’s
performance to
create the desired
impression
facebook is like
impression
management on
steroids
- Professor Joseph
Walther
Self-Justification: Cognitive
Dissonance
Cognitive Dissonance
• One theory is that our attitudes change because we are motivated
to maintain consistency among our thoughts (known as
cognitions). That is the implication of Leon Festinger’s (1957)
famous cognitive dissonance theory.
• The theory is simple, but its range of application is enormous,
making “cognitive dissonance” part of the vocabulary of today’s
educated people. It assumes that we feel tension, or “dissonance,”
when two of our thoughts or beliefs (“cognitions”) are inconsistent.
• Festinger argued that to reduce this unpleasant arousal caused by
inconsistency, we often adjust our thinking. This simple idea, and
some surprising predictions derived from it, have spawned more
than 2,000 studies (Cooper, 1999).
Inutusan na naman
ako ni sir Charles e
buwisit na buwisit Tension thatDISSONANCE
COGNITIVE arises when
nga ako dun, pero one is simultaneously
ba’t sumusunod aware of two
inconsistent
ako? cognitions. For
example, dissonance
may occur when we
realize that we have,
with little justification,
acted contrary to our
attitudes or made a
decision favoring one
alternative despite
reasons favoring
Cognitive Dissonance
• Another way people minimize dissonance, Festinger
believed, is through selective exposure to agreeable
information. Studies have asked people about their
views on various topics and then invited them to
choose whether they wanted to view information
supporting or opposing their viewpoint. Twice as many
preferred supporting rather than challenging
information (Fischer & Greitemeyer, 2010; Hart et al.,
2009; Sweeny et al., 2010). We prefer news that affirms
us over news that informs us.
selective exposure
The tendency to seek
information and
media that agree
with one’s views and
to avoid dissonant
information.
Cognitive Dissonance
• Dissonance theory pertains mostly
to discrepancies between
behavior and attitudes. We are
aware of both. Thus, if we sense
an inconsistency, perhaps some
hypocrisy, we feel pressure for
change. That helps explain why
cigarette smokers are much more
likely than nonsmokers to doubt
that smoking is dangerous (Eiser
et al., 1979; Saad, 2002). They
find it difficult to change their
behavior (smoking), so they
instead cling to their attitude
(smoking isn’t dangerous).
INSUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION
Please don’t tell the
next participant that
it was boring,
Well, that
convince him that
was a boring
this was exciting and
task.
fun.

Cover story: how

expectations affect
performance
INSUFFICIENT JUSTIFICATION

I was paid
with a dollar.
Crap! Insufficient
justification of
Reduction
dissonance by
internally justifying
one’s behavior
when external
justification is
“insufficient.”
Self-Perception
Adulting era na
ba? Self-perception
The theory that
when theory
we are
unsure of our
attitudes, we infer
them much as
would someone
observing us — by
looking at our
behavior and the
circumstances
under which it
Self-Perception
• Self-perception theory (proposed by Daryl Bem, 1972) assumes that we
make similar inferences when we observe our own behavior. When our
attitudes are weak or ambiguous, it’s similar to someone observing us
from the outside.
• Hearing myself talk informs me of my attitudes; seeing my actions
provides clues to how strong my beliefs are. If we observe ourselves
acting as a leader, we begin to think of ourselves as leaders (Miscenko
et al., 2017).
• When we buy organic food, we begin to think of ourselves as people who
believe organic food is healthy (Koklic et al., 2019). When we post selfies
on social media, we begin to think of ourselves as someone who needs
to diet (Niu et al., 2020). This is especially so when we can’t easily
attribute our behavior to external constraints. The acts we freely commit
are self-revealing.
 Facial feedback
effect
The tendency of
facial expressions
to trigger
corresponding
feelings such as
fear, anger, or Smile thru the
happiness. pain lang par.
 Over justification
The effect
result of
bribing people to
do what they
already like doing;
they may then see
their actions as
externally
controlled rather
than intrinsically
appealing.